Futures in the Making: Ethnographies of GenAI and Digital Creative Work
Facts
- Contact person:
- Anastasiia Varetsa
- Financer:
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- Faculty of Technology and Society
- Responsible at MaU:
- Anastasiia Varetsa
- Time frame:
- 01 September 2025 - 31 August 2030
- Faculty/department:
- Research environment :
- Research subject:
About the project
Digital creative professions and generative AI are rapidly evolving together, shaping the conditions under which they operate. While much current research focuses on how GenAI impacts workflows and is perceived by users, this doctoral project shifts attention to the ongoing sense-making processes surrounding GenAI in everyday creative work practice.
Method
The study employs sensory ethnography to explore the complex entanglements between digital creative professionals and GenAI. Through a series of rapid workplace ethnographies at communication, creative, and advertising agencies, the project situates these dynamics within broader contexts of digital disruption, shifting professional identities, and accelerating futures. A key methodological dimension involves unpacking how professionals and GenAI mutually constitute one another over time. Thus, it considers how professionals make sense of GenAI becoming part of their work, understand its role in the present, and imagine where it is taking their professions.
Two questions guide the research
- How are creative work and GenAI mutually shaped and mediated in everyday work practice?
- What future pathways for digital creative professions and workspaces emerge from these interrelations?